One person was injured in an apartment fire early Thursday at the Albert Pike Hotel in downtown Little Rock.
The fire was contained to one apartment on the eighth floor, but it triggered the building's sprinkler system which flooded some residents' apartments, according to the Little Rock Fire Department. A resident from the damaged apartment suffered injuries that were not considered life-threatening.
Destry Brown, who lives in a unit adjacent to the burned one, said sprinklers left about 1½ inches of water in his living room.
An investigation into the cause of the fire was still underway, a Fire Department spokesman said Thursday.
Residents of the Albert Pike Hotel have lately raised concerns about the frequency with which false alarms are triggered in the building.
City data show that the Fire Department responded to 500 alarms there since 2015, and more than 50 percent of them were because of unintentional smoke detector activation.
"We don't think twice about [the alarms] anymore," Brown said.
Brown has lived in the residential high-rise since 2014, and in that time, Thursday's fire was only the second time the alarms signaled an "actual emergency," he said.
He and other residents have said they no longer bother to evacuate their apartments when the alarms sound.
"My right leg ain't going to be able to go down eight flights of stairs every time the fire alarm goes off," Brown said.
Constructed in 1929, the Albert Pike Hotel is a low-income housing complex that allows tenants to use Section 8 vouchers for federally subsidized rent. Residents typically pay about 30 percent of their incomes toward their rent. The U.S. Housing and Urban Development Department pays the rest.
Metro on 03/03/2017